Norwegian Wood -- A Tragedy

Like most reasonable people, I was appalled by the bombing and shooting in Norway for which Anders Behring Breivik has taken credit. I am working my way through his manifesto -- at least it is purported to be his, although it is signed by Andrew Berwick and shows London as the point of origin, not Oslo. It is slow going, since it is dense and often makes little sense, but I figure I need to try and see what was on his mind.

I knew that there would be people concerned about another mass shooting and would try to use the deaths for their own political ends and I was right. Today I got an email from a friend with a link to David Codrea's Gun Examiner blog. Here is the headline of that blog, taken from Rep. Carolyn McCarthy's website:

"“Norway Terrorist Used Lax U.S. Gun Laws To Help Get Armed for Massacre,” a headline on Rep. Carolyn McCarthy’s tax-funded website claims. “Anders Behring Breivik’s Manifesto Describes Buying  High-Capacity Magazines from U.S. for Purpose of Mass Murder.”

If only we would let her disarm us, all would be well:

    One type of weaponry in particular that terrorist Anders Behring Breivik easily acquired from the U.S. – high-capacity ammunition magazines – would be prohibited from sale or transfer if H.R. 308, a bill by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY4), would pass and be signed into law.  That legislation currently has 109 cosponsors in the House."


Continue reading on Examiner.com McCarthy blames Norway shootings on ‘lax U.S. gun laws’! - National gun rights | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/gun-rights-in-national/mccarthy-blames-norway-shootings-on-lax-u-s-gun-laws?CID=examiner_alerts_article#ixzz1TW6jlGOC

This is my response, sent to my friend and to David Codrea. I'd send it to McCarthy, but I doubt that it would do a single iota of good: her mind is made up and she is right and righteous in her rectitude, so to speak.

"OK, let us for a moment assume that Breivik was limited to 10-rnd magazines. Since he was attacking an unarmed group on an island, magazine changes every ten rounds with his Ruger Min-14 wouldn't have slowed him down significantly. So, what benefit would the ban on high-capacity magazines have been in this case? The initial killings, of course, were done without a firearm, using common agricultural products. Would Rep. McCarthy like to see some form of control of fertilizer, since it figures in many explosions of IEDs? Or diesel fuel? Where would she and those like her stop in regulating the activities of potential terrorists? And how would these potential terrorists be identified? Until she and her ilk can answer questions such as those to the satisfaction of many of us Americans, we will continue to oppose efforts like this to make us more subject than citizen. Oh, and there is that pesky phrase, unique to the Second Amendment, that says that the right of individuals (the Supreme Court has affirmed that in this case as in others, the right of "the People" is an individual right, not a collective one)  to bear arms "shall not be infringed." I take that to mean that bearing arms includes the magazines and that limiting the number of rounds -- 10, 30, 100 -- is an infringement.

Would it make me any happier to see that Breivik had used an AK bought on the black market with Bulgarian 30-rnd magazines? Yeah, maybe, because then idiots like McCarthy and her kind couldn't try to blame this sociopathic tragedy on US laws. But the people he shot would still be wounded or dead. As dead as those in the path of the blast wave from his Ampho bomb.

Rep. McCarthy and those like her are not playing with a full deck, nor are they playing to win, in order that the American people may remain free. Shame on them and where's the recall ballot?"

Someone said, in the wake of this tragedy on a wooded island near Oslo, that as horrible as it is, this act is, perhaps, the collateral damage that is the unintended consequence of living in a free -- reasonably, anyway --  society. When people are free to act responsibly or not, without the constant monitoring that is the norm in dictatorships of left and right -- and is becoming all too common in places like the US and UK which were formerly free of such things -- they are free to do horrible things. The price of preventing more of these tragedies is to curtail and circumscribe rights and freedoms. It might be safer, but I don't want to live there and neither do most of my friends.